Hackathon website: rules, schedule, teams, sponsors

Before and during: two jobs

Weeks before, the site is a landing page: theme, format (in person, online or hybrid), dates, location, who it's for, prizes and a register button. During the event it becomes a handbook: the schedule, the Wi-Fi details for the venue (if you're happy for them to be public), submission deadlines, the judging criteria and who to ask for help. Plan for both from the start, and put the handbook parts on their own pages so the landing page stays short.

Pages that cover it

Home: Theme, dates, place, eligibility, headline prizes, register button.
Schedule: Check-in, opening talk, team forming, meals, workshops, code freeze, demos, judging, awards. Times in one zone, stated.
Rules: Team size, what can be prepared in advance, open-source and licence rules, code of conduct, who owns the work.
Judging: The criteria and their weighting, who the judges are, how demos run and for how long.
Sponsors: Who's supporting the event and any sponsor-specific prizes or APIs.
FAQ: Beginners welcome? Food? Overnight? Bring a laptop? Accessibility?

Multi-page sites work in Anticode, so these can be separate pages under one design. Write rules and judging in plain language, numbered, so a dispute at the end can point to a line rather than a memory.

Team registration

Most hackathons need more from registration than a name and email: team name, member names, experience level, dietary needs, t-shirt size, and whether someone needs a team. The contact form on a page laid out by Anticode's design engine has fixed fields (name, email and a message), which is enough for a small event if you list the questions above it. For separate fields, ask for a custom form tied to a site function, with up to 30 plain-text fields, stored and sent to connectors like any other submission. For choices to tick, ask for the registration to be built as an app; app forms reach you through the same pipeline and can go to the same connectors.

Route registrations where organisers already work. A form connector can post each one to a Discord or Slack channel for the team, add a row to a Google Sheet or Airtable base for headcounts and catering, or send it to any webhook. Each submission is sent once without retries, so reconcile against the dashboard before ordering food.

Sponsors: real commitments only

The sponsors page is where hackathon sites most often overreach: a grid of famous logos from companies that were emailed but never replied. Hackers notice, and so do the companies. List a sponsor once there's a signed agreement or a written yes, at the tier they've actually committed to. Until then, a short "Become a sponsor" section with what each tier gets and a contact form is more honest and more useful.

Building it

Describe the event: "a website for a 24-hour student hackathon on climate tech, 8 to 9 March in Manchester, with schedule, rules, judging, sponsors and FAQ pages, and team registration". The Architect plans the pages and asks what changes the build. Technical (IBM Plex Sans) and Brutalist (Archivo) both suit hackathons; pick an action colour that matches your branding. Anticode's Sentinel checks every form's destination and the page's Content-Security-Policy before publishing, which matters when your audience will look at the source.

During the event, change times in place in the visual editor or ask for a change in a sentence. If participants are building with AI too, the hackathon app builder guide covers prototypes they can demo.

Limits

No project submission system. Teams submit through Devpost, a form tool or a shared repository; link to it.
No judging or scoring tool. Use a spreadsheet, or build a scoring app separately.
No live announcements feed. Use Discord or Slack; the site can link to the server.
No ticket sales on the page. Paid events can use a payment link from your own provider.

Questions people ask

How early should a hackathon website go live?

Six to eight weeks before for a student event, longer for one that needs travel. Publish the landing page first and add the handbook pages as they're settled.

Can people register as individuals and find a team?

Yes: add a question for it, and run team forming on the day or in your Discord.

Can we reuse the site next year?

Keep the project, ask for a change with the new theme and dates, and publish again. Recent versions stay in version history.